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Google Downranks 65,000 Pirate Sites in Search Results
- jstalin 8y agoIf only they would downrank sites that exist purely to defame: ripoffreport, stdreport, blacklistreport, etc.
- briandear 8y agoI would add sites that exist to extort in that same category. (i.e mugshot sites, and those “claim your business support site” sites.)
- hiccuphippo 8y agoIf only they would downrank sites that exist purely to duplicate content from others: blogs, questions and answers, wikis, etc.
- codedokode 8y agoI would prefer that Google would add labels like "pirate site" or "legitimate copy". How can a normal user understand what kind of site they are visiting and whether the site has a legal copy of a movie? The copyright agreements are not public. For example, there is a website that allows to watch Japanese TV from abroad (quite expensive by the way). How one can be sure that they are not paying to scammers?
- nashashmi 8y agoIf they labeled them then they would also ha e an obligation to remove them.
- duxup 8y agoIs that true? Just having links and they'd have to remove it? If they're down ranking them that obviously indicates they know what they are already, but they're not removing them.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoWell USA have had at least one foreign national extradited for having a webpage with links to what was later deemed to be unlicensed content. So, such things are clearly on a par with terrorism or murder -- I'm sure they'll be arresting Google execs forthwith. /s
- otalp 8y agoHow can Google be sure? They can't, so they can't do it
- codedokode 8y agoIf they cannot determine which site is legal then they should not be playing with sites' ranks.
- copyrighteous 8y agoSure they could. Copyright owners could list the content they own in some centralized system, and provide canonical URLs or domains for accessing that content. Google could then show that a particular search result is the canonical page for a given movie, without having to try to guess whether some other page has an illegal copy.
- bdhess 8y agoThis sounds like it would practically work like "enhanced DMCA takedown for search results". Please no. Basically, you're wishing away a number of huge problems, including (1.) that copyright attaches at the time of creation, while the owner of that copyright is often multiple steps removed from the act of creation and determined by complex legal arrangements; (2.) copyright ownership for a particular work may differ depending on political jurisdiction; (3.) copyright ownership is not the same as distribution rights, which also may vary based on political jurisdiction; (4.) it's not clear how fair use could be accommodated in such a system. It would also have the effect of favoring larger entities with more copyrighted works; i.e. Disney would have a better chance of navigating this system than an independent creator would.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoYeah, I experienced this problem hardcore when trying to find an ebook I wanted to buy DRM-free. You search for that and you get a ton of PDF sharing sites. As it turned out, it was hard to find a legit link there because the publisher didn't offer any DRM free options, mind you. But yeah, when I was looking for a proper way to purchase, all I found was pirate versions.
- sudouser 8y agoexactly, i had to download illegal pdf of drm book I already bought, which unfortunately only works in that awful adobe digital desktop app...
- scarface74 8y agoThey already do. If I search for a movie or tv show on Google from my iPhone, the top results are direct links to YouTube, iTunes, Starz, Prime Video, Hulu, Vudu, Netflix and Google Play Video.
- mikec3010 8y agoCopyright law doesn't apply equally in all jurisdictions. So I would prefer they default to the lowest common denominator
- shiado 8y agoI remember I used to do filetype searches for mp3, mp4, flac, etc... and get all sorts of good stuff. I would find ftp servers with thousands of songs and just download anything interesting. I feel like the Google search algorithm peaked many years ago and has gradually been neutered by all sorts of special interest groups who have no doubt harassed Google with legal threats. Google probably doesn't want to censor results the way they have been forced to. Even pdf filetype searches got ruined too because Elsevier and JSTOR probably harassed Google as well. The recent change to Google images where they removed links to images made me switch to Bing.
- iaml 8y agoIt would be funny to see bing finally reach google search quality not because it got better, but because google got worse.
- visarga 8y agoI use Bing whenever I want to find "pirate" sites.
- andrewmcwatters 8y agoThis is already frequently true depending on what you're looking for.
- dalbasal 8y agoThey probably do this the way Google usually does, some sort of probability of similarity. They don't know for sure if a picture is pornographic, or a piece of audio is fair use. Once they reach acceptable accuracy, in their calculus....
- KMag 8y agoA lot of stuff falls into grey areas both for AI classification and human opinion. Let's not forget that humans disagree widely over what's pornographic and what's fair use. Let's not pretend there's a canonical oracle of pornography or (apart from court rulings) what's fair use. It stinks when their AI is clearly wrong or when you disagree with their AI, but it's hard to fault them for setting some accuracy goal when they're trying to hit a fuzzy target anyway. Maybe your complaint is really that their appeals process is too opaque or difficult. There I agree, but I don't fault them for stopping short of perfect on their AI classifiers.
- pwaai 8y agoI'm actually pirating a lot less. I started to buy / rent movies on Youtube. Youtube Premium also lets me watch everything with zero ads. Netflix is a major staple. The fact of the matter is, the "Steamification" of mainstream media is almost complete. iTunes, Steam, Youtube Music, Spotify, Netflix, Prime. In the future we will be able to stream new movies, possibly infinite variations created on the fly by AI. Imagine an AI that has watched every possible recorded moving pictures and is able to conjure up entire new story plots, characters, and visuals on their own that caters exactly to the viewer. Also its harder to download torrents now so I naturally just pay for it if I really need it. The only way I would torrent something is if it was not available for purchase.
- waterphone 8y agoThey're doing this sort of thing a lot more often, it seems like, whether through manual actions targeting specific sites or algorithm changes that suddenly take a high quality top ranked page and disappear it from results entirely. It's happened to me where I had the most relevant result for a search term (in fact, it's the website that popularized that term) and now it's gone from all Google results. It's still the top result on every other search engine, but I've been unable to get it back at all on Google.
- paulie_a 8y agoNzbget + Kodi is actually better then browsing multiple services legal or not.
- chrisper 8y agoAlso sonarr
- duxup 8y agoHow often are pirates just starting with google anyway? I suspect most folks searching really do want a legit copy.
- scarface74 8y agoThis. If I want to find content that falls off the back of truck, I know where to look. But the people using Google to find content, are likely looking for legitimate content. I actually appreciate searching for a movie on my phone using Google and seeing at the top all of the legal places I can easily get content. Especially if one of those links are a service I already subscribe to.
- clarry 8y agoI'm not a regular pirate so I have no idea where to look. Search engines have been useful in the past.
- djhaskin987 8y agoIs the 65k number an implementation detail? Like because of 16 bits or something?
- EpicEng 8y agoDoubtful...
- nafizh 8y agoThat is why if I need to download anything, I search with duckduckgo now.
- scarface74 8y agoIf content owners want to fight piracy, make content easier to get at a price people are willing to pay. There will always be a certain contingent of people that will never pay for content and will always choose piracy. I personally stopped pirating music when iTunes Music came online. It was much easier to pay $0.99 for a song than to scour Napster,Kazaa, Limewire, and the rest of the p2p software. Now with Apple Music, Spotify, etc. why bother pirating music? I subscribe to Netflix,Hulu with no commercials, DirectvNow and Amazon Prime. I could find most of the content on pirate sites, but why would I bother? I would much rather just pay $65 a month (well actually I get Netflix free via T-mobile so $55/month). Movie Pass was too restrictive and too much of a hassle to bother with, but I have no reason to pirate new releases anymore now that AMC has AMC Stubs A+. I signed myself and my wife up for the subscription the day it became available. A movie is now a cheap date night when we just want to get out of the house and do something.
- jacekm 8y ago55$ is still quite a lot of money in majority of the world. Plus some content is not available in some regions. I pay for Spotify but for movies (anime in particular) I still need to resort to torrents sometimes. I'd much more prefer to simply pay and avoid the hassle if only I had such opportunity.
- scarface74 8y agoOf course you have to cater to the local market realities. Doesn’t Chrunchyroll cater to anime fans? If you have to resort to piracy because their is no legal alternative but you would pay for one if it existed, it kind of proves my point.
- jacekm 8y agoYes I agree with you. I've actually had Crunchyroll in mind when writing my post - many titles are not licensed for my country.
- hakfoo 8y agoIn the end, though, piracy can solve "easier" a lot faster than legitimate services, especially as you get more into niche content. There's no way to build a legal "everything in one platform" service, just because of the logistics of trying to find rightsholders, and deal with ones who may be outright hostile (think of all the TV/movie firms who are desperate to bootstrap their own streaming services, rather than just being another section inside Netflix's catalog). For a lot of services, we've seen "it doesn't have everything, but it has 90% of the most popular things" and that's been good enough. But is it really? I suspect a significant number of customers will gradually return to piracy-- at least as a supplement-- as the legit catalogs get exhausted and their tastes reach for more and more obscure stuff that's not available anywhere else. I suspect the only real solution would be some sort of mandatory licensing-- let the platform owners scoop up everything and just submit a royalty to some escrow system based on how often it's consumed.
- tiatia123 8y agoAll medium traffic sites depend on google. We had a good running shop. We changed some things. Nearly one week site down due to server crash (don't ask!). No problem. New server, new IP. No problem. Force always SSL. No problem. But then we switched the shopping cart. This killed us. Traffic down 70%
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pessimizer 8y agoGood start, now if they would just downrank sites that were trying to sell me things or were using identical copy, maybe if I search for subject X, I might be able to find websites with people discussing or explaining subject X. Generally, when I search for a movie or a book on a search engine, I'm not trying to buy, pirate, or read the wikipedia article about it (or I would have just searched wikipedia.)
- znpy 8y agoRemember that DuckDuckGo exists and its search results are pretty good.
- richjdsmith 8y agoI've been using DDG since around January this year and am continually blown away by how infrequently I need to turn to "The Big Guys" (Google, Bing) to find something I didn't find on DDG. It's been maybe half-a-dozen times relating to forums on some obscure software package? That combined with DDG showing the top StackOverflow result inline on my search has kept me a very happy DDG user.
- phobosdeimos 8y agotorrentz2.eu is a good way to search for torrents. DMCA compliant, at least on paper so mileage may vary. But it has helped me out many times. Google isn't the internet. Eerily close but not 100%.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoI thought it was taken down by "the feds", I assume it's being run by some government agency under direction of media rights holders now? These sites seem to survive for some time playing whackamole, but AFAICT law enforcement got all the long running big sites. It's curious that, again from what I can tell, such sites often get taken over (not the actual sites but copycat domains that Google serve) as copycats in order to serve malware. But somehow that's preferable (for the government agencies) to hosting inert torrent links.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoI do all of my searching with + Reddit appended. Get way better curated results.
- qop 8y agoI switched to Bing two years ago and I'm pretty pleased with how well it works. Insane how people are coming to grips NOW that Google is an advertising company instead of ten years ago.
- lunulata 8y agoThis downrank is an ineffective farce. Search google for any show/movie with free and online attached to it and I still reliably get a result on the first page to stream pirated content from.
- unstatusthequo 8y agoDuck, duck, SearX
- navs 8y agoI have noticed a decrease in my Pirate related searches. Hopefully they fix this before Halloween.
- KMag 8y agoGoogle also seems to have done this with little regard for its effects on the balance of power in the eternal struggle between pirates and ninjas.
- abhiminator 8y agoAs much as I despise multi-billion dollar 'copyright holding' corporations, I feel this is a strategic move by Google to thrust more legitimate channels of media consumption (Netflix, Prime Video, Et al) to the top of the search results page. Having said that, people who actually use torrents regularly know their way around Google and other web-based search engines, and this move, therefore, should have little or no effect on that particular demographic.
- Kagerjay 8y agoI find myself using Bing all the time precisely for this reason. I would love to subscribe to netflix, hulu, hbo, etc but all my favorite TV shows are always on different networks. I wouldn't mind paying for the service (but not for 3 of them), but the online streaming mirrors are really good at what they do. Bing just works. Its has significantly less bias than google which is why I always use 2 search engines.
- ddtaylor 8y agoAs a subscriber of Netflix it's trash for my tastes now. Many of the shows I did enjoy are no longer on the service and once my subscription runs out I won't be renewing it.
- poe876 8y agoI agree. Shows have become more political and less entertaining. And it's only getting worse.
- dleslie 8y agoWe did this for similar reasons; the documentary and edutainment selection ran dry, and the children's section had a terrible signal/noise. Now we've been without any TV or streaming services for about six months, and relying on a Kodi box and my collection of ripped DVDs. We spend more time together as a family.
- 8y ago
- kragen 8y agoI often find that Google sends me to scam sites like Elsevier instead of Library Genesis or TPB when what I am searching for can be found there. Is there a better search engine out there that solves this problem?
- amdanil 8y agoI like to use Yandex when I can't find something using Google. Their search results feel more raw and untouched.
- cup-of-tea 8y agoMake DuckDuckGo your default search engine now. Just do it. You won't miss Google.
- quikoa 8y agoWhat I miss with DDG is better date ranges. Filtering by date can help a lot in narrowing down what you want to get.
- oldcynic 8y agoI dislike the "last month", "last six months" way of doing ranges oh so much. Where are the 2 years or older, 4 years or older options at the other end of the scale or let me specify two actual dates. Sadly I often need to search for older content - DDG are least worst, but they're all poor to hopeless at it.
- ddebernardy 8y agoHas DDG become any better for programming-related searches? Asking, because last time I tried using it for more than a handful of queries, I ended up jumping back to using Google because searching for obscure programming error messages seldom led anywhere useful.
- bitL 8y agoIt used to be better ~6 months ago. Now it's as bad as Google or even worse :(
- AngryData 8y agoGoogle has been trash for pirate content for awhile now. 9/10 sites it does show are fake and straight up malicious with like 50 different things trying to hijack your browser and make you install shit. Not that real pirate sites are exactly safe, but at least they actually provide what people are looking for.
- Kagerjay 8y agoWhen I search for TV shows I watch it inside a VPN sandboxie on a isolated incognito browser I don't use everyday. Any data that writes to a local DB is done through an isolated folder instead. I've learned the hard way having to reinstall my computer too many times. I don't run things like umatrix though. Torrents and pirate sites are actually fairly safe. You can always double check the SHA hash signature of the file you download as well with the official source. I don't endorse pirating at all and usually pay for all my software though. Its just all my favorite TV shows are across multiple networks. I would pay money for a netflix that encompasses every TV show based on my usage. Such a service doesn't exist though.
- ddtaylor 8y agoI find it entertaining Google will fight "piracy" which could include downloading content you legally have the ability to watch while promoting malware instead.
- dawnerd 8y agoSo I was looking for an older movie a while back, not even necessarily to pirate but just if it was available anywhere. Tons of results on YouTube that were just hiurbking clips with a frame that said check description for url. Amazing google can’t stop those but they can do things like demobilize lgbt content.
- bagels 8y agoWhat does this verb mean in this context, "demobilize"?
- 8y ago
- rawoke083600 8y agoDid google search every worked well for pirated content ? Always got to boobies and Viagra with Rolex's first before the latest Marvel or Autodesk software ;)
- terminalcommand 8y agoI seriously think we need torrent trackers solely residing on ipfs. The popular trackers (such as ptb) remove content very easily. It is getting really hard to find tv shows on the net. What we need is a completely anonymous distributed solution. We won't need google then.
- icebraining 8y agohttps://www.tribler.org/ https://www.tribler.org/, which is developed by a not-for-profit research group supported by EU and Dutch research funding, does distributed torrent search without any central server. It's been around for almost a decade now.
- mintplant 8y agoCareful, all Tribler users are effectively exit nodes in Tor terminology. Other users' downloads will appear to come from your IP as your machine participates in the proxy network. This is spelled out exactly nowhere on their site, which I think is brazenly irresponsible.
- tribler 8y agoIncorrect. You need to check the box in settings called 'become exit node'. Thnx for mentioning us btw! With 13 years running and our bandwidth token for Bittorrent (no ICO) it seems we're the only team left doing innovations. All other p2p teams seem to have died in the p2p winter.
- terminalcommand 8y agoThanks a lot for the heads up. This seems to be exactly the thing I was dreaming of. If anyone is interested https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki link contains more information. I'm surprised I didn't hear of this project before.
- dcbadacd 8y ago
- novaRom 8y agoOn any new device I normally do the same thing each time: 1) Install Firefox Nightly 2) Install uBlock Origin add-on 3) Enable Duck Duck Go as default search engine 4) Enjoy I am still looking for a good replacement for Gmail.
- kokx 8y agoSo far, I really like ProtonMail as a gmail replacement. Their web interface is great. It costs quite a bit more money though (compared to free gmail). I've been using it for half a year now, and the only gmail features I miss (their spam filtering and automatically prioritizing mails) are those that require them to read your mail. Which I like that they cannot.
- bproven 8y agoHow do you get around not being able to search email in protonmail? At least in the web client which is all I use in gmail.
- kokx 8y agoYou can actually search quite well in ProtonMail. Though it only searches some email headers (title, sender, receiver etc) and tags. Those are not stored encrypted. But it doesn't search the body of your emails.
- josefresco 8y agoI searched for "nba finals game 1 replay" and the like during the finals and was only presented with pirate options. There was no legal/legit way to view or purchase these games - and Google was ranking pirate sites all over the first page. I wonder if this has changed.
- panoply 8y agoThe onion network is fast becoming the only network.
- hungerstrike 8y agoAre there any apps that perform searches on multiple search engines and combine the results?
- klez 8y agoYou mean a meta-engine? Like Duckduckgo? Or you actually mean an app you can install?
- hungerstrike 8y agoDoes ddg use google results? I have read that they do not.
- bhhaskin 8y agoThey use Google's index I believe, but that is not the same as using Google's results.
- IceWreck 8y agoYou are looking for SearX. Its a meta search engine and really hackable. Also, its open source.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]